What is Farmer-led Irrigation?

What is Farmer-led Irrigation?


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While a lot of progress has been made on sustainable agriculture, there is much work yet to be done to meet rising food and water demands in a resource finite world – in addition to improving the lives of small-scale farmers. Farmer-led irrigationoffers opportunities for inclusive, sustainable, and positive change. However, urgent international commitment to and investments in farmer-led irrigation are required to tackle the water and food challenges of our time.

“Water does not respect sectoral boundaries. We must work across countries and across boundaries. As business people, farmers cannot wait for water to flow to them – farmer-led irrigation is an active management process,” said Richard Colback, Agribusiness Water Specialist at the International Finance Corporation.

The event brought together over 200 attendees, including ministers from Rwanda, Zambia, South Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania. The World Bank delegation was led by Simeon Ehui, Director of Agriculture Global Practice. The event called on African national governments to commit to supporting farmer-led irrigation, which is based on building inclusive private sector supply chains, boosting technological innovations, and increasing use of pumps and water application. The farmer-led irrigation approach emphasizes that the government should support the development of inclusive private sector supply chains to facilitate the development of the growth of farmer-led irrigation.

“We need to combine our efforts with the private sector to bring technologies for farmer-led irrigation to smallholder farmers,” said Vincent Bamulangaki Ssempijja, the agriculture minister of Uganda.

The Joint Statement asserts that farmer-led irrigation will fast-track access to irrigation services for millions of farmers in order to enhance adaptation of their farming systems to climate change and climate variability. In addition, the Joint Statement declares that farmer-led irrigation will make substantive contributions to the attainment of many of the Sustainable Development Goals – particularly Goal 1: No poverty, Goal 2: Zero hunger, and Goal 3: Health. This joint statement explicitly addresses the need to:

The World Bank will continue to support actions to champion farmer-led irrigation as a major technology, policy, and financing option. Farmer-led irrigation is taking root as a major power for inclusive change worldwide – and at its core, for improving the lives of millions of small-scale farmers.

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Irrigation has been surprisingly underplayed in sub-Saharan Africa despite renewed interest in agricultural development since the Maputo Declaration of 2003. Talk of a green revolution for Africa most often centres on improved soils, better seeds or more fertiliser.

This is surprising as few changes to farming hold as much promise as irrigation. It can increase yields and production, protect against yield losses to variable rains, and enable cultivation in dry seasons and of potentially high-value crops that consume more water. Crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa are often compared unfavourably to those seen in Asia. Yet Asia has 30% of its arable land irrigated, compared to 6% or less in sub-Saharan Africa.

Bad investment experiences may account for this. From the 1950s to the 1970s, ambitious large-scale publicly-operated irrigation projects were launched across Africa. By the 1980s, however, too many had failed at a high cost. One response was to hand over the management of such schemes to water-user groups. But putting farmers in charge didn’t reduce the high costs of some schemes, nor did it resolve problems in scheme design and operation.

“My vision for farmer-led irrigation is for a farmer to irrigate her small field, grow vegetables, raise livestock, and provide a future for her family.” Rob Bertram, United States Agency for International Development.

By 2050, the world’s population will reach 10 billion people and global food demand will increase by 60%. This challenge is intensified by agriculture’s extreme vulnerability to climate change. The African continent is facing an existential food security crisis in light of this climate emergency: population is growing fast, and agricultural production cannot keep up due to the fact that less than 10% of arable land is irrigated, which means little insurance against erratic rains and climate shocks.

Lack of irrigation puts at risk the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers and their families across the continent, who remain hostage to climate variability. To address these threats, governments are setting ambitious targets for irrigation expansion and increased farm productivity.

Farmers are taking actions. They have been driving the establishment, improvement and expansion of irrigated agriculture, without any external support. The concept of Farmer-led Irrigation Development (FLID) is thus nothing new, but only during the last two decades have governments and the development community recognized the massive areas using this “off-the-record” process and the countless opportunities are still out there for farmers to take the initiative in irrigation.

Farmers’ action in irrigation is constrained, however, by a less than ideal environment, particularly in the case of smallholder farmers.  The environment is not always conducive for them to interact with the private sector. Smallholder farmers might have challenges raising money from financial institutions to improve their farming business.  They often lack access to the most suitable irrigation technology, as irrigation equipment suppliers have limited penetration in the countryside. Weak market linkages also present a challenge. This is where the government can have a critical role in making the surrounding environment more enabling for farmers, resulting in FLID happening on a larger scale, at a higher pace, and in a more inclusive and sustainable way.